You know, I was raised by a particularly intelligent woman.  And I’m not just saying that because she sometimes reads this blog either.  She already knows it, and false modesty isn’t a sin in which she partakes.  This, by the way, is the disclaimer part of the post.  I do it often.  You’d think that being bitter for so long I’d have ceased to care who I offend, but it just hasnt’ worked out that way.  So, Mom, this one isn’t your fault.  Or, well, really it is, but let’s both blame someone else and then talk about them behind their back.

I grew up believing that romance novels are trashy.  Yes, I can hear you all saying, “But they ARE” all the way over here, but think about it.  Really?  What’s trashy about them?  Are they badly written?  Some, yes, but not all by any stretch.  Jane Eyre isn’t anything but a very old romance novel, and no one calls it trashy.  Well, you say, but it’s a classic!  A classic is just something that’s survived.  Like me.  Not all classics (unlike me) are really any good.  Try reading Moby Dick and then tell me with a straight face that you enjoyed it. 

So if it isn’t the quality of writing that makes it trashy, what is it?  The cover art?  Yes, some is laughably bad.  I love the spoofs on the Longmire website, one of which I’ve shamelessly stolen here.  So we do often judge books by their covers, which is another reason I’m pretty happy that I now own a Sony Book Reader, because I can read whatever the france I want and nobody gets to judge me for it. 

But sci-fi and fantasy are also riddled with bad cover art, but no one says “Trashy” before the phrase “Sci Fi” or rolls their eyes they way you’ll get if you tell someone you have just finished a good romance novel.

So, I decided to test my prejudices and I’ve started downloading romance books.  I blame Charlaine Harris, actually.  I fell in love with the TV series True Blood on HBO (watched on the web because it hasn’t come out in the UK yet, dammit), and have since read all her Sookie Stackhouse novels.  Actually… I read all 8 of them in about 2 weeks.  Seriously.  And I don’t even LIKE vampire stories.  Talk about trashy.  I get images of Béla Lugosi and get the giggles.  Sorry, Anne Rice, but even if you take the comical aspect away, how on earth is cannibalism sexy?  Tell me that?  Anyway, that’s another rant altogether.

Anyway, I could go on and on about what makes romance trashy, and by now you’re probably worried that I will.  Either that or you’re shouting “Too Late!” at your monitor.  I’ll skip it all and get to the point. 

Write this one down, Ethel.  It’s the s-e-x.  If men talk about sex it’s bawdy and perhaps coarse, but boys will be boys.  If women talk about sex… and I’m talking about grown women here… it’s trashy?  It’s trashy to write about it, read about it, and for gods sake, don’t think about it either!  That leads down a path of decay!  Or maybe it’s just that most romance books deal with love and relationships.  By god that IS trashy!

Because I’ve been reading a few romance books lately…. probably… 40 books in the last 4 months. (I’ve got a lot of catching up to do… Jane Eyre was the last one I’d read!)  Some historical, some modern, some futuristic and a couple paranormal (that’s what they call vampires and ghosts these days.)  And I will tell you… some were really crap.  No doubt about that.  But there were a few that made me laugh out loud, got me misty eyed, and even made my pulse go a wee bit faster.  But guess what…. none of them were trashy.  Imagine that.

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CNN reported yesterday that a woman was held for the “virtual murder” of her “virtual” ex-spouse.  Yes, the guy dumped her online, so she logged in to his account in “Maple Story” a virtual reality world, and killed his avatar.

Apparantly the actual charge is something like hacking.  CNN reporters are such a bunch of drama queens.  Murder!

But I think the absolute best part of the story is here:

The woman used login information she got from the 33-year-old office worker when their characters were happily married, and killed the character. The man complained to police when he discovered that his beloved online avatar was dead.

It reminds me of the young guy that went to police after being beaten up by a pack of old ladies at a Sarah Palin rally recently.  Allegedly.  Or something.  But the point is, if I were a 20 year old man that went to an enclosed space that was guaranteed to be full of activists of quite the opposite point of view from me, I wouldn’t admit that little gem of stupidity, much less that mob mentality had seized a bunch of seniors and I’d gotten my ass handed to me.

And that’s what this is about really….. good judgement.  We expect our political candidates to have it, we want our bosses and our employees to have it, our teachers and even strangers, and then we go off and do things like give our co-workers our passwords after engaging in some “virtual marriage” (as if the real thing isn’t hard enough, we have to pretend to do it online as well) and then are so shocked and surprised when they go postal on us after we tell them that we’re done with them that we call the police when we’ve been virtually wronged.  You know what?  There’s enough real wrong in the world to worry about this idiot guy’s virtual hurt.

I seriously hope the cops end up just laughing at the guy and saying ‘Umm, this is why everyone with brains ever told you never never never give out your password, no matter what kind of virtual nookie you’re getting.”  And then I hope they add “Dumbass.” just for good measure.

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Remember how when you were 19 you could hop in a car and drive for 16 hours and arrive at your desination feeling maybe slightly tired and jazzed from too many soft drinks and fast food, but generally okay?

20 years later and hopping on a plane for a quick visit to ailing parents (it used to be a desperate need to be on a beach, or shopping that would make me drop everything and go, but no more) turned into a month long ordeal involving swollen ankles, thrombophlebitis (which includes steroids, pain killers and a heating pad), an aching back, and really most of the time wanting to be back home, not that said parents aren’t good company, but more that I’ve become a creature of habit and I like my habits.  In other words, I’m getting old.

Not that I’m complaining about getting old.

Okay wait yes I’m complaining about getting old.

I was prepared for the wrinkles and the grey hair, but I suppose I always thought that life would be fabulous.  Or if life wasn’t fabulous, I certainly thought I would be.  Maybe once the cloud of jetlag lifts, I’ll be able to figure out what the hell happened.

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I have to tell you, I usually get at least a small chuckle out of the products aimed at women.  They all seem to assume we’re either mindless drones who don’t think about anything but having less bacteria in our lives than our neighbours (see the keyboard post below to see how that is working out for me), or that we’re so obsessed with our own bodily functions that we dream and converse daily on our freshness.

But the tables have turned.  Yes, Radox, the manufacturer of a men’s soap in the UK has decided that men are so stupid that putting ‘for men’ isn’t quite enough.  No, to let the guys know this product is really for them, they’ve actually gone all out and put penises on the packaging.  Perfect for the caveman in search of shower gel.

Not only are they penises, but they are ebullient, happy looking fresh penises.  In a cluster.  Umm.  Yeah… Come to think of it, maybe I don’t want to know what they’re selling here.

I used this shower gel once just to see what would happen.  It was pretty disappointing. 

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Yesterday I did something unusual: I looked at my keyboard.  Those of you who type as badly as you spell won’t understand that.  But then perhaps the 2 kewl people don’t read Bitter Women.  (After my last hiatus, I’m not sure anyone does, but that’s another story.)

So I looked down, and was completely ooked out.  I’m not a tidy woman, but I am clean, and I realised my hands were resting on something completely repulsive.   Exhibit A shows the keyboard after I’d cleaned the left side of it:

This is not the interesting part.  See I do realise that most people clean things all the time.   This is pretty much what I saw, except that my keyboard has more of a grey tint than brown (well after I cleaned it, anyway) but the lighting here makes it look like I took this photo in a darkened bar.

The rant comes in here:  I freaking hate digital cameras.  Oh sure they’re lovely and when you take pictures of your cruise to Florence, you get nice sharp images of the twisty roads and perfect skies.  But that all comes at a price: seeing a bit more of reality than you really want to see.  Case in point:

Yes, I was actually putting my hands on that… every day. No wonder I got sick last week. In fact, I feel a little nauseous looking at it now.

Life is not flattering at 10.2 megapixels.  I really don’t want to see my world in razor-sharp 3 point focus.  And I can do quite a lot of this reality-checking record-keeping with a rechargeable li-ion battery that allows me to take up to 520 shots in single-frame shooting mode.  Yes, now close-up facts can now be in my face all day long and recorded forever.

If the camera did this to my keyboard, you can only imagine what it did to my face.

I miss the days of fuzzy inexactitude… of flatterying distance… of polite need-to-know reality. 

I also realise, dear readers, that missing any type of days is a sign of getting O. L. D.  Girl-fren has always warned me that getting older ain’t for sissies.  I see it’s also not advisable for those with a weak stomach or an expensive camera.

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